eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

February 2012

02/20/2012

Kate Chopin’s character, Edna Pontillier, feels owned and wishes to feel instead that her life is a gift and not a possession. That is what Chopin’s story, The Awakening seems to be about. Edna is 28 years old and in a brief summer by a summer sea off the coast of Louisiana, becomes aware of just how vital freedom is to a human soul. Alas for her, she is possessed by a husband who possesses her well and thoughtfully - Someone who has given her two children and who also find her “essential” to their well-being.

“Looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of property which has suffered some damage,” Mr. Pontilier reveals the sort of “love” that his wife will come to resent. “Mr. Pontellier was very fond of walking about his house examining its various appointments and details, to see that nothing was amiss,” Chopin later writes,

“He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain – no matter what – after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.”

For him, a wife is of value to the degree that she cares for and protects his other things and Chopin characterizes him as such in the following paragraph,

“He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother’s place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business. He could not be in two places at once; making a living for his family on the street, and staying at home to see that no harm befell them. He talked in a monotonous, insistent way.”

And Edna Pontillier responds accordingly.

“An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her with a vague anguish...like a shadow... a mist passing across her soul's summer day.”

And all the while the sounds of the sea shore in the Gulf of Mexico bid one to think of sailing away, of freedom from an external life that had not been entirely freely chosen.

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. . . . A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, - the light which showing the way, forbids it. . . . Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life – that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”

This desire to give herself to life as a gift rather than to live out life as a possession purchased is what Chopin, I think, refers to as “the awakening.” For Edna Pontillier, it begins with a song played on a piano. Ironically, Chopin’s Impromptu

“The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier’s spinal column. It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth.”

There is a certain irony to the fact that Edna Pontillier, surrounded as she is by the only recently freed slaves that serve her in her New Orleans mansion, longs for a feminist emancipation. And Chopin has her throw herself into her emancipation entirely.

“She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility.”

And it is in this state that she begins to entertain dreams of liberation in all ways. She goes for a sail with the rakish Robert Lebrun.

“Sailing across the bay to the Chênière Caminada, Edna felt as if she were being borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast, whose chains had been loosening – had snapped the night before when the mystic spirit was abroad, leaving her free to drift whithersoever she chose to set her sails.”

Throughout the book, Chopin returns to the despair one feels when they are owned. And the elation they feel when they feel they are freely giving. Responsible love versus infatuated love. “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children;” says Edna one day, “but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”

I wouldn’t give myself.

Why people wait until they are married for seven years and have children to “awaken” to their need for the freedom to “be themselves” is a question of culture and perhaps choice of reading and maybe even brain chemistry. We wish to be authentic and to have offspring, and some people do not value these things in that order chronologically (as I can well attest).

“She let her mind wander back over her stay at Grand Isle; and she tried to discover wherein this summer had been different from any and every other summer of her life. She could only realize that she herself – her present self – was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect.

For the first time she recognized anew the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her earliest teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.

And what should Robert, feeling the same way about her do? Respect her status as “owned” or her desire to freely give? Responsibly, he leaves for Mexico, as though distance changes anything. Edna feels his departure deeply.

“Robert’s going had some way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing. She sought him everywhere – in others whom she induced to talk about him.”

In The Awakening, Madame Ratignolle serves as a foil to Edna Pontillier for Madame Ratignolle has found herself a husband who both owns her well and can be the recipient of a freely given love too. Edna makes the following observation of Mr. and Mrs Ratignolle, betraying perhaps that she can tolerate no alloy of being owned any more even though it may well be a healthy part of any truly solid relationship.

“She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle — a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life’s delirium.

I suspect that here is where the reader should begin to ask what Kate Chopin intends the reader to think and feel for Mrs. Pontillier’s dilemma. Has she come to resent being “needed” so much that she can not enjoy or appreciate a life where being owned makes up a portion of responsible existence? Is she letting herself become “spoiled” as it were, believing in something that can never be for anyone? Completely free of obligation?

Poor Mr. Pontillier, who, as Chopin describes him, “could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.” Little does he know that his wife is “awakening.” Like “some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun.”

Of her sister’s wedding, Edna says “a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth."

She seems to believe that the “love” that causes a woman to marry is an illusory and deceiving thing.

"Do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself, 'Go to! here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.' or, 'I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue?' or 'this financier, who controls the world's money markets?'"

“She had resolved never again to belong to another than herself” Chopin tells us. “I am no longer one of Mr. Pontelliere's possessions to dispose of or not,” Edna tells Robert upon his return from Mexico. “I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'here Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both"

Would a person be better off never to “awaken” to a desire for this sort of “freedom”?

"The years that are gone seem like dreams -if one might go on sleeping and dreaming- but to wake up and find -oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all ones life."

In the last chapter, Edna resolves that in the end, she would, in the words of the New Hampshire State motto, “live free or die.”

“Despondency had come upon her there in the wakeful night, and had never lifted. There was no one thing in the world that she desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them. She was not thinking of these things when she walked down to the beach.”

And in this frame of mind, she takes off her clothes and swims out into the Gulf of Mexico, leaving Robert, Mr. Pontillier, her children, and an entire world that gives none of us all the freedom that the artist within us might crave.

In a way, Edna Pontillier has become a victim of that which has done in humans by the millions. A desire for a perfect life. As Chopin writes of Edna’s “Last Supper” scene,

“As she sat there amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtaking her; the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition. It was something which announced itself; a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed. There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable.”

Yes, the “unattainable” – why are some of us willing to suffer so much for it? “Mrs. Pontilier, you are cruel” Robert says to her in their last conversation,

"Maybe not intentionally cruel; but you seem to be forcing me into disclosures which can result in nothing; as if you would have me bare a wound for the pleasure of looking at it, without the intention or power of healing it."

The words might well apply to Kate Chopin herself.

Question for Comment: “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose” the Christian missionary martyr, Jim Elliot once wrote in his journal (I remember reading it in college). Might it be equally truthfully said that he is no fool who gives up what he could easily have for what he will never have? It seems to be the Romantic’s creed.